iPhone app projects user household tax payments for federal deficit

U.S. taxpayers can now use their iPhone to compare how much different plans to tackle the federal deficit would cost them in their yearly income taxes.

Debt Bomb — based on the U.S. tax code and publicly available data from the Congressional Budget Office and other government sources — allows users to project how a raise in taxes would cost in their personal income taxes over the years. In order to make a projection, users input basic income tax data — modeled after what a household pays in taxes — into the app.

“Debt is going to be one of the defining things that is going to come up and bite us,” Kyle Smith, the app’s creator, told The Daily Caller. “People have a hard time conceptualizing big numbers.”

The app, developed by Nassau Research LLC in Austin, Texas, launched Thursday in the iTunes App Store.

In order to keep projections simple, Smith based the app on what the deficit would look like if taxes were raised. The app, Smith told TheDC, actually underestimates what the magnitude of the problem since it does not account for change in household behavior. The data sets and the economic modeling used for the app, however, bring the projections into an approximate ballpark range.

“When we tested it out, the numbers it’s spinning out are very close to the numbers think tanks and the CBO put out,” Smith said.

Debt Bomb also features a history of the federal debt crisis and allows users to contact congress directly from the app.